Overview of Polkadot and its Design Considerations

Burdges, Jeff; Cevallos, Alfonso; Czaban, Peter; Habermeier, Rob; Hosseini, Syed; Lama, Fabio; Alper, Handan Kılınç; Luo, Ximin; Shirazi, Fatemeh; Stewart, Alistair; Wood, Gavin

doi:10.48550/arxiv.2005.13456

Cited by 16 publications

(27 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…We cover these algorithms in more detail later in this subsection. On the one hand, block production (BABE) is intended to be probabilistically safe (able to continuously generate new blocks with a probabilistic assurance that the generated blocks will be finalized after some time) [15]. On the In what follows, we describe the NPoS and the hybrid consensus scheme adopted by Polkadot.…”

Section: Consensus Mechanismsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…When a validator node receives a block, it checks the block's timestamp and slot number, compares it to its local time, and forecasts future slot times. More information about local time synchronization in BABE is provided in [15] and [16].…”

Section: Consensus Mechanismsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…GRANDPA reaches agreements on chains rather than blocks; in other words, whenever more than two thirds of validators vote on a chain containing a certain block, all blocks up to that one are finalized at once. For more details about GRANDPA, refer to [15] and [17].…”

Section: Consensus Mechanismsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Analysis of Polkadot: Architecture, Internals, and Contradictions

Abbas¹,

Caprolu²,

Pietro³

2022

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Polkadot is a network protocol launched in 2020 with the ambition of unlocking the full potential of blockchain technologies. Its novel multi-chain protocol allows arbitrary data to be transferred across heterogeneous blockchains, enabling the implementation of a wide range of novel use cases. The Polkadot architecture is based on the principles of sharding, which promises to solve scalability and interoperability shortcomings that encumber many existing blockchain-based systems. Lured by these impressive features, investors immediately appreciated the Polkadot project, which is now firmly ranked among the top 10 cryptocurrencies by capitalization (around 20 Billions USD). However, Polkadot has not received the same level of attention from academia that other proposals in the crypto domain have received so far, like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Algorand, to cite a few. Polkadot architecture is described and discussed only in the grey literature, and very little is known about its internals. In this paper, we provide the first systematic study on the Polkadot environment, detailing its protocols, governance, and economic model. Then, we identify several limitations-supported by an empirical analysis of its ledger-that could severely affect the scalability and overall security of the network. Finally, based on our analysis, we provide future directions to inspire researchers to investigate further the Polkadot ecosystem and its pitfalls in terms of performance, security, and network aspects.

show abstract

Section: Consensus Mechanismsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Consensus Mechanismsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Analysis of Polkadot: Architecture, Internals, and Contradictions

Abbas¹,

Caprolu²,

Pietro³

2022

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Thus, given the voters' preferences and a desired committee size, a multiwinner voting rule outputs one (or more) winning committees. Important examples of multiwinner voting include political elections (with parliamentary elections as the prototypical example), but there are also more recent use cases arising in computer science (e.g., multiwinner voting rules can be applied in group recommendations Boutilier, 2011, 2015), in the problem of diversifying search results , in facility location problems (Farahani and Hekmatfar, 2009;Skowron et al, 2016), blockchain consensus protocols Burdges et al, 2020), and in genetic programming (Faliszewski et al, 2017a)). In this paper, we are concerned with approvalbased committee (ABC) voting, i.e., multiwinner voting based on approval ballots.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Axiomatic characterizations of consistent approval-based committee choice rules

Lackner¹,

Skowron²

2021

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We prove axiomatic characterizations of several important multiwinner rules within the class of approval-based committee choice rules. These are voting rules that return a set of (fixed-size) committees. In particular, we provide axiomatic characterizations of Proportional Approval Voting, the Chamberlin-Courant rule, and other Thiele methods. These rules share the important property that they satisfy an axiom called consistency, which is crucial in our characterizations.

show abstract

“…However, the candidates do not need to represent humans. For example, this model describes (1) the problem of locating public facilities-there the candidates correspond to possible physical locations where the facilities can be built [Farahani andHekmatfar, 2009, Skowron et al, 2016], (2) the problem of presenting results by a search engine in response to a user query-there, the candidates are web-pages, and voters are potential users searching for a given query , (3) the problem of selecting validators in the blockchain, where the candidates are the users of the protocol Stewart, 2020, Burdges et al, 2020]. For more examples that fall into the category of committee elections we refer to the recent book chapter [Faliszewski et al, 2017] and to the recent survey [Lackner and Skowron, 2020].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Core-Stable Committees under Restricted Domains

Grzegorz¹,

Skowron²

2021

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We study the setting of committee elections, where a group of individuals needs to collectively select a given size subset of available objects. This model is relevant for a number of real-life scenarios including political elections, participatory budgeting, and facility-location. We focus on the core-the classic notion of proportionality, stability and fairness. We show that for a number of restricted domains including voter-interval, candidate-interval, single-peaked, and single-crossing preferences the core is non-empty and can be found in polynomial time. We show that the core might be empty for strict top-monotonic preferences, yet we introduce a relaxation of this class, which guarantees non-emptiness of the core. Our algorithms work both in the randomized and discrete models. We also show that the classic known proportional rules do not return committees from the core even for the most restrictive domains among those we consider (in particular for 1D-Euclidean preferences). We additionally prove a number of structural results that give better insights into the nature of some of the restricted domains, and which in particular give a better intuitive understanding of the class of top-monotonic preferences.

show abstract

Overview of Polkadot and its Design Considerations

Cited by 16 publications

References 0 publications

Analysis of Polkadot: Architecture, Internals, and Contradictions

Analysis of Polkadot: Architecture, Internals, and Contradictions

Axiomatic characterizations of consistent approval-based committee choice rules

Core-Stable Committees under Restricted Domains

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About